"Will this tragedy teach us the lessons that so many politicians and impulsive voters have been denying for so long?"
The first lesson is that America must come home: we must end the Empire of Militarism and of playing the role of policeman of the planet. Both of these habitual roles are backfiring and depleting trillions of taxpayer dollars that could be better used toward rebuilding our country’s infrastructure, strengthening our catastrophe-response networks and preparing for the coming megastorms like Hurricane Harvey.

As devastating flooding from Harvey continues around the Houston area on Tuesday, the city’s Muslim community is stepping up: turning mosques into 24-hour shelters and bringing in diapers, water and food from their own homes.

Yet characterizations of the carnage by the National Weather Service as "historic," "unprecedented" or "beyond anything experienced" should not be conflated with the spurious claim that the devastation wrought by Harvey is "unpreventable" or "unexpected."
The outcry by advocates, experts and activists against the unplanned, for-profit development of cities like Houston has been consistently ignored by city officials, leaving millions--especially the poor and people of color--in the fourth-largest city in the U.S. in a death trap.
"Houston is the fourth-largest city, but it's the only city that does not have zoning," Dr. Robert Bullard, a Houston resident and a professor who studies environmental racism, told Democracy Now! on August 29. "[As a result], communities of color and poor communities have been unofficially zoned as compatible with pollution...We call that environmental injustice and environmental racism. It is that plain, and it's just that simple."

Even a casual reader of the Bible notices that between the alleged divine endorsement of genocide in the conquest of Canaan and Jesus’s call for love of enemies in his Sermon on the Mount, something has clearly changed.
What has changed is not God but the degree to which humanity has attained an understanding of the true nature of God. The Bible is not the perfect revelation of God; Jesus is. Jesus is the only perfect theology. Perfect theology is not a system of theology; perfect theology is a person. Perfect theology is not found in abstract thought; perfect theology is found in the Incarnation. Perfect theology is not a book; perfect theology is the life that Jesus lived.

Walk with Al Jazeera’s Basma Atassi in Mecca, as she takes you on a tour to see the major landmarks that millions of Muslims visit during the period of Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage.

Even a casual reader of the Bible notices that between the alleged divine endorsement of genocide in the conquest of Canaan and Jesus’s call for love of enemies in his Sermon on the Mount, something has clearly changed.
What has changed is not God but the degree to which humanity has attained an understanding of the true nature of God. The Bible is not the perfect revelation of God; Jesus is. Jesus is the only perfect theology.

As millions of Houston residents faced life-threatening flooding on Monday with the saturated remnants of Hurricane Harvey expected to bring even more heavy rains in the days ahead, journalist Naomi Klein warned against the notion, already being pushed by some on the right, that the disaster shouldn't be "politicized."

In a statement on Monday, the retired Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles became the first member of the Church hierarchy to speak out against President Donald Trump's pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In a strongly worded statement, he called the decision "disgusting" and said it undermined the rule of law.

The earliest Latin commentary on the Gospels, lost for more than 1,500 years, has been rediscovered and made available in English for the first time. The extraordinary find, a work written by a bishop in northern Italy, Fortunatianus of Aquileia, dates back to the middle of the fourth century................

This sheds new light on the way the Gospels were read and understood in the early Church, in particular the reading of the text known as “allegorical exegesis” in which elements in the stories are interpreted as symbols.